


upside down, over there

by buried_alive



Category: The Lord of the Rings (Movies), The Lord of the Rings - All Media Types, The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Gen, M/M, because sam has a heart big enough for multiple types of love for multiple people at the same time, rosie is mentioned multiple times
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-10
Updated: 2019-07-10
Packaged: 2020-06-25 17:02:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,450
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19749988
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/buried_alive/pseuds/buried_alive
Summary: Because maybe Sam was always meant to love someone who was going and gone.(alternatively titledthat's love bitch!!!for all the reasons you’d imagine)





	upside down, over there

**Author's Note:**

> This was inspired by a rewatching of the movies with my sister and a deep dive into several different Tolkien wikis and forums
> 
> I use the word love liberally here. Sometimes I don’t think the distinction between different types is so clear cut. Also, this is mostly movie-verse because I haven’t read the books in forever plus my deep lore knowledge of anything further than the books and movies isn’t great!!
> 
> And in that spirit, sorry for any facts I might’ve gotten wrong, that’s called I simultaneously care way too much and way too little about canon details.

The first time Sam knows was during a midsummer’s festival years before the War of the Ring.

 _Come on, Sam_. Frodo says, grabbing him by the hand and dragging him over to one of the open tables. _You’ve worked hard all spring. You need to eat honey-cakes, drink ale with me_.

 _I was just doing my job, Mr. Frodo._ Sam replies, stumbling after him in a daze.

Frodo rolls his eyes, _But it means more than that and it’s hard work too._

Sam just shrugs sheepishly, struck wordless and flushing, looking at Frodo as he laughs.

Sam remembers how later at the bonfire, the one they set during the festival every year, how the light set on the ridges of his face, angles hard and soft in equal measure and all too enticing. He remembers thinking that he had never seen anyone so beautiful, except perhaps Rosie when she danced two-step with red ribbons in her hair.

(It was a parallel maybe, an echo, of years later at Bilbo’s 111th birthday.

 _Go on, Sam._ Frodo says then, grinning wider, wider _. Ask Rosie for a dance._

Sam couldn’t say anything intelligent or worth knowing, something that could’ve expressed himself and all he wanted in that moment, as Frodo pushed him, half-drunk and swaying on his feet, into Rosie’s open arms.)

-

_Confound it all, Samwise Gamgee!_ Gandalf yells, dragging Sam up by the collar and slamming him down on the table. _Have you been eavesdropping?_

 _I ain’t been dropping no eaves, sir!_ _Honest._ Sam throws his hands up and screws his eyes shut. _I was just cutting the grass under the window there, if you follow me._

 _It’s a little late for trimming the hedges, don’t you think?_ Gandalf’s anger could fill the room, dark and menacing and edging on something beyond here.

_I heard voices—_

_What did you hear?_ Sam shakes his head, trembling now. _Speak!_

_Nothing important—that is, I heard a good deal about a ring—and a Dark Lord. And something about the end of the world, but—Please, Mr. Gandalf, sir, don't hurt me! Don't turn me into anything unnatural!_

_No?_ Gandalf looks up at Frodo behind Sam’s head.

 _Perhaps not,_ He leans in, something akin to humor in his eyes. _I’ve thought of a better use for you_. 

If Sam could’ve twisted around right then, at that moment, if he could’ve looked, he would’ve seen that Frodo was smiling.

-

For just about as long as Sam could remember knowing him, prior to the war and the ring and everything that would come after, there had always been a gap yawning between them, between Frodo and himself.

Because in the Shire there was a way doing things, a place in which one stood in respect to others. Sam was a gardener and Frodo was his boss, a dynamic just the same as the one between his old Gaffer and Bilbo had been. And regardless of anything, whether he loved him or respected him or thought of him as close friend or brother, they weren’t equals, at least according to the world looking in.

This is something he always felt, an aspect of the world, just or unjust, in the few times he spoke to him, that Boromir understood well. Though he had never been on the bottom end of it, he understood what hierarchy meant, what it felt like to owe, the rank and file and duty of it all. He knew, as an effect of place and time and relation, you couldn’t just abandon the things you were told to do, even if you wanted to.

There was always that all too familiar tug of _listen, listen. You have a place and you must fill it. You are born for some things as others are born for whatever else._

You had to see it until it was done, whatever it was, to the ends of those to which you were inclined. Love of any kind was never meant to be part of it.

 _This is a job_ , he remembers his Old Gaffer saying to him one day, while he was still mentoring him. _And one you must do well. He is your boss and a stead above you. He is not merely your friend, though you might be friendly. This you should know._

Sam would just nod in agreement and not think much of it, wouldn’t think much of it until years later during the hardest times, at the Falls of Rauros, at the Tower of Citith Ungol, at Henneth Annûn, when he would turn the dynamics of their relationship around in his mind almost obsessively, like he was trying to find some fold, some complication, some machination he couldn’t see before. 

( _Have you ever considered that it’s strange that some are rich and others are poor, Mr. Frodo?_ He wanted to ask, did in a thousand imaginary conversations he had with himself.

_Have you ever thought it unnatural that we say some are more worthy for wealth or position than others? And what if they are not?_

_Because certainly,_ he would think, he would say in some half-daydream. _I’m not much for being smart. I’m just a simple hobbit, but I’ve thought about kings and masters and it right don’t make much sense in some situations, to me anyway._

 _Isn’t that how this all started? When a king of men succumbed to power, when he couldn’t do what he should’ve when it really mattered?_ )

-

_If I take one more step, it’ll be the farthest away from home I’ve ever been._

Sam keeps going, Frodo’s arm looped around his back.

\- 

Perhaps, more accurately, Sam had always known. He was many things: sturdy and standing on his feet, kind, loyal to a fault, and soft-hearted for nearly every creature under the sun (everything except Gollum, really, and the Orcs), but practical with his heart he was not. He had always had a penchant for wanting things he couldn’t have in some small and guarded part of his heart, even if he never said it, never told anyone.

And what he _wanted, wanted_ this time, was for Frodo to be as he was, as he would later remember him.

-

_Give them a moment, for pity’s sake!_ Boromir yells, waving his arms.

They were sitting on the rocks outside of the Bridge of Khazad-dûm, outside of Moria, and shivering.

 _By nightfall these hills will be swarming with Orcs._ Aragon says, sheathing his sword. _We must reach the woods of Lothlórien._

 _I’m sorry,_ Sam says, turning to Frodo. _I knew you loved him. I knew you two were close._

Frodo just looks at Sam, face blank as if he didn’t recognize him at all.

-

_Don’t leave me here alone,_ Sam sobs on his knees. He’s outside of Torech Ungol now, holding a corpse in his arms. _Don’t go where I can’t follow._

_-_

Sam thinks it’s when they cross over into the Dead Marshes that Frodo’s eyes take on a distinctive edge of something that deeply disturbs him in ways he can’t find the words to express.

Or maybe, really, it’s that they lose something.

If he were to try to tell it to someone who had not seen, he didn’t think he could. It was like Frodo had taken on the rattle of bone with the marrow sucked clean, like he was a lake bed drained of all water and cracking. He was perpetually exhausted, bags permanently fixed beneath his eyes and unfriendly in all the ways that matter, in the ways he had always been, even had been in the last few months.

The ring, Frodo tells him, was growing heavy and heavier with every step they took closer to Mordor and with it, his sense of anxiety and swirling dread.

They cross the bog with caution, dead bodies floating in the water, soft candle lights and tagged shadows. Everywhere stank to the high heavens, the water lined with a greasy film like oil spilled, sticky weeds growing from piles of rank peat. It was dark now at all hours, a heavy layer of clouds perpetually hanging now that they had left Rohan’s lands, since they were approaching the Black Gates, the Ash Mountains far off in the distance, flickering like a mirage in smoke.

They sit in the bog a moment, waiting as Gollum picks his way through the thick grasses as if stuttering out and remembering the way he had gone before.

 _Do you ever think we’ll see sun again?_ Frodo asks. His question comes out as a half-sigh and far away.

 _I don’t know, Mr. Frodo._ Sam says. _I don’t think the sun shines here at all._

He knows it’s not the answer Frodo is looking for.

-

_Don’t you see?_ Sam screams. _It’s killing him!_

_-_

_Give me the ring, Sam._ Frodo says, hands outstretched, sounding less like himself than he had since even Parth Galen.

They were in the tower, Sam was holding the ring, elsewhere he could hear the screams of orcs, of rank wind and fire.

_Sam, give me the ring._

For a moment almost, he doesn’t want to.

-

And maybe it comes to him like the sun burning away the fog in the morning, at his home, or with the Fellowship, on river or foot or climbing the Stairs of Cirith Ungol, that he loved Frodo in many different and crossing ways, that he would follow him until death, every time into the perilous dark, come hell or high water or otherworldly demon.

-

There were some times when Sam could hear Frodo wasn’t himself, when the ring would take hold. Sam tries to explain it, if only to himself, the way Frodo’s voice would be.

( _Like bare teeth clacking, like two pieces dry wood struck together, like hitting rusted metal and listening to it ring_.)

It scares Sam when he tries to remember when it started because every time he would come up empty, like stretching towards some end he couldn’t grasp, fumbling around in the dark where there should’ve been something.

( _He’d heard Frodo describe putting on the ring as being like that once, that it was like ripping away the veil between you and him, like standing naked before the wheel and reeling_.)

It meant he was starting to forget, starting to forget the beginning of this, starting to forget that this would ever have an end.

( _Of course, he remembered the elves though, bright and shining and moving through the woods like ghosts in some corpse-light, glowing and thin like strained milk._ )

Sam didn’t want to forget.

-

_I can’t carry it for you, but I can carry you._

Sam finds his footing in a fit of remembrance. Frodo had never really been a big hobbit, not heavier than a wheelbarrow full of butternut squash, but here on the slopes of Mount Doom, just a hair’s breath away from the end, from casting it into the fire and being rid of it, so close he could almost taste it, nothing had ever felt heavier.

-

_Take my hand! Don’t you let go! Don’t let go._

And suddenly the room was crumbling and on _fire—_

-

(The night after they pass the Black Gates, Sam dreams he’s back with his father again. It was not long until Lithe, in the middle of those weeks when spring would melt away into summer and the kingfishers and thrushes would sing. They had much to do, would be planting the summer barley soon, always seeding spinach and carrots these days, tying up the tomatoes when they grew too tall to support their own weight.

 _Most of the people you work for, at least at first and depending on who it is, won’t care about you as a person, only the work you do. Mostly they just want the job done_ , his Gaffer would say. _Though I respect Bilbo and the like, that’s what I’ve learned all these years. If you do good enough work, that should be enough._

Sam remembers tilting his head up at flocks of migratory swallows winging in the afternoon sky, watching them tip and waver, moving as if stunned by falling.)

-

_Could it have gone any other way?_

At Rivendell before the council, Frodo pledges to go and Sam knows he must follow.

-

They were burning and blistering, but Sam couldn’t feel anything but relief as Frodo sagged against him, hot and fading like a dying star. The fire was warm, but somehow the arms wrapped around him were warmer.

 _I’m sorry,_ he wants to say. _I love you. If we are to die here, I think it’s only right you should know. I think I want you to know. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry—_

_-_

Sam knows the old stories. Knows of the ancient wars. Of Morgoth and Beleriand and the Simarils, or vaguely of them at least, of what Gandalf told or Frodo told or maybe Aragorn or some passing remembrance in a folktale or legend.

 _Perhaps,_ Sam would think once, _perhaps the loss of one life wasn’t so much in the face of a continent sinking into the sea. Perhaps it’s not so much next to the death of millions._

 _But perhaps also_ , _Frodo matters to me. Here and now and not then. Not in some lost ancient world. Some long forgotten golden age. Even if he is only one among many, he is here, he is my closest friend and greatest companion._

Frodo was there next to him, breathing and warm in the night. He was walking through his dreams and speaking to him in the morning.

Maybe this was a task he asked for, volunteered when he thought no one else would and maybe Sam followed, as he always did, without hesitation.

But maybe also this was too much to ask of one person, regardless of who they were. Who on any planet, after all, could carry the burden of such unfathomable evil?

-

When he goes back to the Shire, Sam does the one thing he knows better than anything else, he plants trees, plants a _mallorn_ sapling, a gift from the elves, from Galadriel, the Lady of Light.

-

Maybe someday after the war is done, after Rosie dies, after his children are grown, Sam leaves Middle Earth. Maybe after weeks of sailing Sam stumbles off the bow of his ship onto white shores. Maybe he looks up to see a face he hadn’t seen in years, that he only dreamt about now.

 _Hello, Sam._ He says, smiling bright as a star. _It’s so good to see you again._

-

(Maybe someday he can find Frodo again, bright and whole and new. Maybe then he finds he can finally understand, can say _I hear you_ and mean it.)

**Author's Note:**

> It never really occurred to me how much this theme of passing on occurred throughout Tolkien’s stories. Like so much of the setting of Middle-earth and of the plot itself is wrapped up in this notion that this world is not what it once was. Everywhere there are ruins, the elves are leaving, the world of men lies broken and lost. Even the legends and stories read in this really nostalgic way, that there were once great wars and so much sacrificed, that battles dragged on for decades, that whole lands disappeared into the sea. I wondered how the elements applied to Sam’s and Frodo’s relationship, so I wrote this to explore that.
> 
> And yes, some of this is OOC like Sam questioning Middle-earth social, political, and economic inequalities. In the books, from what I remember, Tolkien wrote him as being content with his place in life as a peasant and layperson, but I was curious about what it would look like if he did, considering he would see how ultimate power corrupts, as well as the strength and kindness of ordinary people in the face of great horror.
> 
> Also, I wanted to write out my own feelings about power dynamics stuff in the books and, to a lesser extent, the movies.


End file.
